National Liberal Action

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The National Liberal Action (NLA) was a national liberal splinter party from 1970/71, in which primarily FDP members of the right wing gathered. They rejected the social-liberal coalition of the SPD and FDP, which the FDP had agreed to form in 1969.

The NLA was founded on June 17, 1970 in Wuppertal by Erich Mende , former FDP leader and vice chancellor, Siegfried Zoglmann , until shortly before the FDP deputy chairman of North Rhine-Westphalia , Heinz Lange , FDP parliamentary group leader in the Düsseldorf state parliament, and Franz Mader , Head of the FDP district with the largest number of members, East Westphalia-Lippe, founded. The group was dissatisfied with the shift to the left of the FDP under its chairman Walter Scheel , which in 1969 brought the party into an SPD- led coalition under Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt . The foundation took place, among other things, under the impression of severe defeats in state elections, in which the FDP had failed to re-enter the parliaments in Lower Saxony and Saarland. In North Rhine-Westphalia, the FDP was able to maintain its position in the state parliament thanks to increased votes from former SPD voters. At the beginning, the NLA was a working group of FDP mandate holders with the aim of returning the FDP to a right-wing liberal course and replacing Walter Scheel as party chairman with Hans-Dietrich Genscher at the federal party conference from June 22 to 24, 1970 in what was then the federal capital Bonn belonged. For Mende, who led the FDP for eight years and led to its greatest success to date - 12.8% in the 1961 federal election - and Zoglmann, motions for exclusion were submitted before the party congress.

Less than a month later, the NLA set up on the Hohensyburg near Dortmund with the involvement of politicians from Lower Saxony, Schleswig-Holstein, Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria as a registered association at the federal level. As a board member, Zoglmann declared that the “non-partisan community of national-free people” was not intended as the basis for a new political party. However, a later development in this direction "on another level" is possible. The event had 30 founding members. In addition to Zoglmann, they elected, among others, the former Bavarian FDP chairman Dietrich Bahner , who had been voted out the previous month, to the 15-member collegial board.

Around September the NLA constituted itself as an independent party. Mende and Mader, however, joined the CDU . The party did not stand in any state elections and NLA representatives themselves called for the election of the CDU in the 1971 state elections in Berlin and Schleswig-Holstein . As a consequence of the failure of the NLA, a new national liberal party, the German Union , was founded in the summer of 1971 , which Zoglmann also chaired.

Program

Representatives of the expellees' associations set the tone in the leadership . Zoglmann, for example, was a member of the Sudeten German Council . Accordingly, the Ostpolitik of the then government was fiercely opposed. Nevertheless, there were considerable reservations of the Federation of Expellees towards the new party, which could be related to the close proximity of the Association of Expellees to the Union parties .

literature

  • Richard Stöß: The Action Group Fourth Party. In: Richard Stöß (Ed.): Party handbook: The parties of the Federal Republic of Germany 1945–1980. Volume 1 AUD-EFP, Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen 1983, pp. 336-366.
  • Right formation . In: Die Zeit, July 17, 1970.